NatureS: The Celebration

This Friday, the 28th, I'll be reading from NatureS, now officially published, at the Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center. I'm happy it's done, delighted with the production of the book, and hope anyone who might read this note will feel welcome to drop in. Things get underway at 8:00 o'clock.

It's a curious thing, I admit, publishing a first book past 60; I hope George Eliot was right that "it's never too late to be what you might have been." For me it's come to seem simply a way to participate in the conversation of the time in which I live. Over the past three years, as I've been working on the book, I've reconnected with poet friends from times and places past, and met younger poets working their way toward their own modes of statement, and I've enjoyed it immensely. There's a whole level of psyche that such a community of persons so actively engaged with imagination sustains.

Hiking a trail here in the Smokies you'll sometimes come across a point along a ridge, a rocky promontory, that, climbed, offers view of the terrain traversed. Making the book has been such an occasion, a chance to see where I've been and what sense I've managed to make of the journey - so far! From the outcrop, after all, you also get a look at the territory that remains to be crossed.

If you're in town, I hope you'll come help me send these songs off into the world.

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The poster for the reading was created by the talented Clare Hubbard, intern at the Center and student at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa.